A major cause of patient and hospital worker injuries occurs transferring patients from hospital beds to transport stretchers or gurneys. The hospital workers must physically lift the patient and move them from the bed to the stretcher. Since the stretcher must be adjacent to the bed in order to transfer the patient, the length of the reach and the angle of lifting becomes a major problem for the hospital workers. This can cause back and other injuries to the hospital workers. Transferring the patient is also labor intensive in that it requires at least two and as many as six attendants to bodily lift or slide or in some cases roll the patient between the hospital bed and the stretcher.
This kind of manhandling of non-ambulatory patients is typically uncomfortable for the patient and may even be detrimental to the patient's condition depending upon the nature of the patient's injury or illness. The mere movement may aggravate the patient's injury. The patient may be dropped or the patient may slip between the bed and the stretcher.
The prior art discloses various hospital stretcher or gurney improvement devices intended to minimize patient discomfort and labor requirements. U.S. Pat. No. 3,493,979 to Koll et al, for example, discloses a transfer device which utilizes a pair of endless belts, one on top of the other. To advance the device toward a patient the upper belt is rotated in a direction opposite the lower belt which forces the upper belt outwardly. When the patient has been reached the lower belt is locked and the upper belt is rotated in a direction to bring the patient on to the upper belt. The upper belt is then locked and the lower belt is rotated to translate the upper belt and patient over the stretcher. The belts are supported by a mechanically complex coupling arrangement including telescoping guide rails. Several subsequent patents improved upon this basic invention. U.S. Pat. No. 3,579,672 to Koll et al added non-rigid supporting fingers to support the endless belts. Dunkin, U.S. Pat. No. 3,765,037 added primary and secondary brakes and an automatic belt tensioning arrangement. Koll et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,073,016 retained the endless upper belt but replaced the lower endless belt with a finite length belt rigidly attached to one side of the stretcher and extensible from the other side of the stretcher. The finite length belt wrap about a separator plate to increase the width of operation of the transfer device to greater than the width of the endless belt. Koll et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,077,073 improved upon this design by providing an improved means to align the tracking of the upper belt.
All of the above devices although useful and improvements over the prior art are complex and can only be operated from one side. The present invention overcomes these problems and limitations.